And there would be a sign reading CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, REOPENING SOON.
By the time I reached the building, this nutty idea had taken over my mind with the force of a compulsion, and not even the sight of Bill Tuggle, the rummy CPA from the third floor, going inside could quite dispel it. But seeing is believing, they say, and when I got to 2221, I saw no chain, no sign, and no soap on the glass. It was just the Fulwider, the same as ever. I went into the lobby, smelled the familiar odor — it reminds me of the pink cakes they put in the urinals of public men’s rooms these days — and glanced around at the same ratty palm trees overhanging the same faded red tile floor.
Bill was standing next to Vernon Klein, world’s oldest elevator operator, in Car 2. In his frayed red suit and ancient pillbox hat, Vernon looks like a cross between the Philip Morris bellboy and a rhesus monkey which has fallen into an industrial steam-cleaning machine. He looked up at me with his mournful basset-hound eyes, which were watering from the Camel
pasted in the middle of his mouth. His peepers should have gotten used to the smoke years ago; I couldn’t remember ever having seen him without a Camel parked in that same position.
Bill moved over a little, but not far enough. There wasn’t room enough in the car for him to move far enough. I’m not sure there would have been room in Rhode Island for him to move far enough. Delaware, maybe. He smelled like bologna which has spent a year or so marinating in cheap bourbon. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, he belched.
‘Sorry, Clyde.’
‘Well, you certainly ought to be,’ I said, waving the air in front of my face as Vern slid the gate across the front of the car and prepared to fly us to the moon . . . or at least to the seventh floor.
‘What drainpipe did you spend the night in, Bill?’
Yet there was something comforting about that smell — I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t.
Because it was a familiar smell. It was just Bill Tuggle, odoriferous, hung over, and standing with his knees slightly bent, as if someone had filled the crotch of his underpants with chicken salad and he’d just realized it. Not pleasant, nothing about that morning’s elevator ride was pleasant, but it was at least known.
Bill gave me a sick smile as the elevator began to rattle upward but said nothing.
I swung my head in Vernon’s direction, mostly to get away from the smell of overbaked accountant, but whatever small talk I’d been meaning to make died in my throat. The two pictures which had hung over Vern’s stool since the beginning of time — one of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee while his boatbound disciples gawped at him and the other of Vern’s wife in a buckskin-fringed Sweetheart of the Rodeo outfit and a turn-of-the-century hairdo — were both gone. What had replaced them shouldn’t have been shocking, especially in light of Vernon’s age, but it hit me like a barge-load of bricks just the same.
It was a card, that’s all — a simple card showing the silhouette of a man fishing on a lake at sunset. It was the sentiment printed below the canoe that floored me: HAPPY RETIREMENT!
You could have doubled the way I felt when Peoria told me he might see again and still have come up short. Memories flickered through my mind with the speed of cards being shuffled by a riverboat gambler. There was the time Vern broke into the office next to mine to call an ambulance when that nutty dame, Agnes Sternwood, first tore my phone out of the wall and then swallowed what she swore was drain-cleaner. The ‘drain-cleaner’ turned out to be nothing but crystals of raw sugar, and the office Vern broke into turned out to be a high-class horse parlor.
So far as I know, the guy who leased the place and slapped MacKenzie Imports on the door is still receiving his annual Sears Roebuck catalogue in San Quentin. Then there was the guy Vern cold-conked with his stool just before he could ventilate my guts; that was the Mavis Weld business again, of course. Not to mention the time he brought his daughter to me — what a babe she was! — when she got involved with that dirty-picture racket.
Vern retiring?
It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t.
‘Vernon,’ I asked, ‘what kind of joke is this?’
‘No joke, Mr. Umney,’ he said, and as he brought the elevator car to a stop on Three, he began to hack a deep cough I’d never heard in all the years I’d known him. It was like listening to marble bowling balls rolling down a stone alley. He took the Camel out of his mouth, and I was horrified to see the end of it was pink, and not with lipstick. He looked at it for a moment, grimaced, then replaced it and yanked back the accordion grille. ‘ Thuh-ree, Mr. Tuggle.’
‘Thanks, Vern,’ Bill said.
‘Remember the party on Friday,’ Vernon said. His words were muffled; he’d taken a handkerchief spotted with brown stains out of his back pocket and was wiping his lips with it. ‘I sure would admire for you to come.’ He glanced at me with his rheumy eyes, and what was in them scared the bejabbers out of me. Something was waiting for Vernon Klein just around the next bend in the road, and that look said Vernon knew all about it. ‘You too, Mr. Umney — we been through a lot together, and I’d be tickled to raise a glass with you.’
‘Wait a minute!” I shouted, grabbing Bill as he tried to step out of the elevator. ‘You wait just a God damned minute, both of you! What party? What’s going on here?’
‘Retirement,’ Bill said. ‘It usually happens at some point after your hair turns white, in case you’ve been too busy to notice. Vernon’s party is going to be in the basement on Friday afternoon. Everybody in the building’s going to be there, and I’m going to make my world-famous Dynamite Punch. What’s the matter with you, Clyde? You’ve known for a month that Vern was finishing up on May thirtieth.’
That made me angry all over again, the way I’d been when Peoria called me a faggot. I grabbed Bill by the padded shoulders of his double-breasted suit and gave him a shake. ‘The hell you say!’
He gave me a small, pained smile. ‘The hell I don’t, Clyde. But if you don’t want to come, fine.
Stay away. You’ve been acting poco loco for the last six months, anyhow.’
I shook him again. ‘What do you mean, poco loco?’
‘Crazy as a loon, nutty as a fruitcake, two wheels off the road, out to lunch, playing without a full deck — any of those ring a bell? And before you answer, just let me inform you that if you shake me one more time, even a little shake, my guts are going to explode straight out through my chest, and not even dry-cleaning will get that mess off your suit.’
He pulled away before I could do it again even if I’d wanted to and started down the hall with the seat of his pants hanging somewhere down around the level of his knees, as per usual. He glanced back just once, while Vernon was sliding the brass gate across. ‘You need to take some time off, Clyde. Starting last week.’
‘What’s gotten into you?’ I shouted at him. ‘What’s gotten into all of you?’ But by then the inner door was closed and we were headed up again — this time to Seven. My little slice of heaven.
Vern dropped his cigarette butt into the bucket of sand that squats in the corner, and immediately stuck a fresh one in his kisser. He popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail, set the fag on fire, and immediately started coughing again. Now I could see fine drops of blood misting out from between his cracked lips. It was a gruesome sight. His eyes had dropped; they stared vacantly into the far corner, seeing nothing, hoping for nothing. Bill Tuggle’s BO hung between us like the Ghost of Binges Past.
‘Okay, Vern,’ I said. ‘What is it and where are you going?’
Vernon had never been one to wear out the English language, and that at least hadn’t changed.
‘It’s Big C,’ he said. ‘On Saturday I catch the Desert Blossom to Arizona. I’m going to live with my sister. I don’t expect to wear out my welcome, though. She might have to change the bed twice.’ He brought the elevator to a stop and rattled the gate back. ‘ Seven, Mr. Umney. Your little slice of heaven.’ He smiled at that just as he always did, but this time it looked like the kind of smile you see on the candy skulls down in Tijuana, on the Day of the Dead.